“Daddy?” Seela was saying.
“What?”
“I asked you if you ever felt guilty.”
“Not then. Not consciously. The night after that I stopped going out drinkin’ with TJ. I took a construction job outside Boulder and never saw either of them again.”
“Do you feel bad now?”
I looked at the daughter I didn’t know and who didn’t know me. I opened my mouth but there was nothing to say. The silence that passed between us carried more information than nineteen years of the father-daughter relationship.
“Why’d you come over, Daddy?”
I could have told her that my life was Med with unanswerable questions like that one, that the fabricated structure that kept me going for two decades had fallen apart and now I was floating around like a baby black widow spider wafting on the breeze. I had no reason to be in that apartment, confessing to a youthful betrayal. I was looking for an anchor, and like a fool, I had snagged on to my little girl.
I should have walked out of there but instead I told Seela about the dinner Mona and I went to, about Star and Harvard Rollins and the man named Meeks. I skipped the part about spying on her mother having sex with Rollins, but I told her that I was sure they were having an affair.
“And when you saw Mommy, she turned away to this detective guy?” Seela asked. Martin and Jamal and Millie were the furthest things from her mind.
“Like I said, she’s been having an affair with him,” I said. “Don’t get me wrong, honey. I’ve had an affair too.”
“With who?”
“That doesn’t matter right now. You don’t know her.”
“And did you kill somebody, Daddy?” my plain-faced daughter asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I certainly don’t remember killing anyone. I never entertained the idea until this Barbara Knowland came on the scene.”
“Maybe she’s lying,” Seela suggested.
“Why would she make up some elaborate lie like that?”
“Maybe she killed him. Maybe you did go up there with her and drink until you passed out. Then, then maybe this guy came back and she hit him from behind a door with a crowbar, and when you woke up, you left and never even saw him. And now that she sees you sitting in the audience, she’s worried that you figured it out and that you’ll send her to jail.”
Seela transformed in front of me at that moment. For years she had just been there: infant, toddler, child, adolescent. Whatever she was, it was as far away from me as a distant moon in orbit around a dead planet. I had only cared about her as a responsibility, not as a person, and she’d never said one thing that touched me.
But now that was all washed away. Seela had shown me how I might be fooled. Barbara Knowland walked up to me wanting to know why I was there. When I didn’t recognize her, she thought that it was an act; she believed that I was going to turn her in for the crime she’d committed decades ago. Maybe I’d heard about her publishing deal and meant to blackmail her.
Of course she would have been the one to kill this Sean Messier, not me. She had the relationship with him. She was pregnant by him. I was no more than a rolling drunk who came to a stop in the wrong place at the wrong time.
I reached out to take my daughter’s hands in mine.
“Seela,” I said. “You are my savior.”
“Daddy, are you all right?”
Someone knocked on the door. The sudden sound made us both gasp and flinch as if we were caught in a moment of criminal intimacy.
Seela stood up and went to the door. She opened it.
“Hi, honey,” she said to Jamal.
He was like many of Seela’s boyfriends: tall, very dark, and quietly handsome. She liked men and boys in that cast but always felt, her mother had told me, that she was never good enough to keep them.
I stood up and put out my hand to him. We’d met a few times when I brought clothes or books or, more likely, a check to the dorm for Seela.
“Mr. Dibbuk,” he said. “How are you, sir?”
“Lucky to have a daughter as wonderful as this child here.”
“Yeah, she’s great.”
I gazed into his dark eyes, wondering if his words were echoed in his heart. Very little I had ever said had meaning in my soul. My true feelings were trussed up in a thousand lies I used to get by. Hence, I never believed anything that anyone told me. This thought came to me like a revelation. I hardly ever believed anything but I did believe Star. I did not question her. Maybe that was because her accusations resonated with the man I buried deep inside me.
“Are you ready?” Jamal was asking Seela.
“For what?”
“To go to Millie’s play,” he said.
“Oh,” Seela uttered. I could see Millie and Martin and her betrayal rising up into her face.
“Go on, baby,” I said then. “Get dressed. I’m gonna be okay now that we talked and you are too. We both know what’s important.”
“Really, Daddy?”
“I’m going home to talk to your mother now.”
I don’t know what she thought I was saying but the words seemed to give my daughter some relief. She put her arms around my neck and kissed my cheek.
“I love you, Daddy,” she said, leaning back and looking into my eyes.
“I love you too,” I said. What else could I say?
Mona was on the couch crying when I got home. At first she thought I could have been someone else.
“Who is it?” she whined when I came through the door.
She was desolate on the cushions, crying into the roseate floral pillow. When she looked up at me, I could see that her despair had nothing to do with me.
“He dropped you?” I asked.
She pressed her face back against the pillow.
I sat down next to her and put a hand on her shoulder. She sat up and put her arms around my neck as our daughter had done.
“Ben,” she cried.
I wanted to tell her that Rollins would have left her anyway, that she was just a dalliance on a long road of women that the detective was traveling. I wanted to confess about my lies to him, but for some reason — for the first time in a long time — I didn’t want her to let me go.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I lost my mind. I wanted somebody to love me. I wanted it so bad. But he, he just told me that it was over, like he was mad. I don’t know what I did.”
I let her hold on to me, unbothered by her need to lament her lover’s abandonment. What did it matter anyway? I hadn’t been there for her. I couldn’t figure out how to talk to her in the bedroom, at the dinner table, in the morning when there was possibility in the air.
For a long time we sat like that. She molded to my form and bleated.
Many minutes later the phone rang.
“Should I get it?” I whispered.
She nodded.
“What if it’s him?”
“I don’t want to talk to him,” she said, looking up at me.
“Hello?” I answered the phone.
“Ben?” Harvard Rollins said. “What are you doing there?”
“What do you want?”
“IS Mona there?”
“She doesn’t want to talk to you.”
“I have to speak to her,” he said, with some urgency in his voice. “It’s important.”
“She said that she doesn’t want to talk. Maybe you could drop by her office tomorrow. Right now she’s on the couch crying her heart out.”
“You’re a motherfucker, Dibbuk. I could have you arrested for what you did to me last night.”
“I didn’t do anything to you, Officer Rollins. You just fell on your ass, man.”
“Let me speak to Mona.”
I hung up then and took a deep breath. I was still as lost as I had been before. But now I felt a little better. All the pieces to the game I was playing had settled into their places. Maybe I was going to lose my position, or my life, but it seemed possible that I could make some decisions from that point on. At least I had obtained some kind of free will.